I was reminded of this term somehow and looked it. Though the word was originally meant for a dish it has become synonymous with a heterogeneous mixture.
Moving on, I was reading an article on why there is some opposition to the NCTC mooted by the Home Minister, P Chidambaram (PC). Apparently PC envisaged an umbrella organization with an operations wing and which would report solely to him. I initially thought Mamata, among various others, was being extremely impractical when she was opposing the very idea of the NCTC. Now I have mixed feelings. On the one hand we have a number of intelligence agencies. Look at this list. For quite some time there has been a clamour for centralized analysis of intelligence collected by various agencies. It is quite possible that a piece of information collected by an agency in Tamil Nadu, which seems insignificant to the local personnel could be the key piece in a puzzle being put together by a central intelligence agency.
So why can't we change the NCTC into such an agency? Unless I am mistaken we do not have a proper central agency today which does that. We have the NSA and CCS (Cabinet Committee on Security). However they cannot sift through the huge volume of information that keeps flowing in. This could be something that is handed over to the NCTC. It can act as a central collator of information coming in from various quarters. It can analyze the same and then give appropriate directions to various government agencies.
This would also require setting up a secure and robust communication network for information sharing between central agencies. Given today's instances like spyware originating from China, the Stuxnet attack in Iran, this should be all the more secure as it would be used to share very sensitive information. Now we can only wait and watch as to how the NCTC game plays out.
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